Tuesday, October 4, 2016

There’s a lot of fear around about
Artificial Intelligence. South Koreans recently flipped out when Google’s
AlphaGo defeated their Grand Master at the national board game. But will AI
usher in the end-times for humanity?

Certainly Hollywood seems to think so. Cue:
Skynet, Age of Ultron, Transcendence, The Matrix, War Game; or, even earlier,
Colossus: The Forbin Project; hell, even as far back as Metropolis in 1927! And
who can forget Hal 9000’s chillingly calm, ‘I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t
do that’ when he refuses to open the pod bay doors for marooned astronaut
Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The equation seems clear: the first thing
self-aware computers will decide to do is kill us. The most consistently upbeat
portrayal of AI and humanity living side by side is in Iain M Banks’s Culture
novels. The ‘Minds’ of the Culture are true artificial intelligence that would
make Skynet look – and feel – like an abacus. And that’s the important
difference: Banks’s AIs have feelings. To be self-aware is to have an opinion,
to be drawn towards some things and repelled by others, and, consequently, to
create and be guided by a moral and ethical landscape.The vast majority of humans are not homicidal
psychopaths, so why should artificial intelligences be any different? Okay, some
Culture AIs are crazy, or mildly anti-social ‘rogues’, but the other Minds keep
them in check.

What Banks’s AIs value is uniqueness. Each
Mind is constructed with a certain degree of randomness built in. They are all
individuals, which is another requirement of true self-consciousness. The
inescapable logic of this is that they also value the uniqueness of the human
mind; for example, in Consider Phlebas
the far more advanced Minds acknowledge that the character of Fal ‘Ngeestra has
a way of looking at problems that is very useful. The Minds are partners with
the people of the Culture, with each side bringing something important to the
table. As a result, the whole civilisation is better for it. Maybe ours will be
too.

This article originally appeared in Beyond,
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I've enjoyed the single-minded investigations of Hank Palace, resolutely sticking to his job while society disintegrates around him in the face of an impending and world-ending meteor strike, and World of Trouble rounds out the trilogy nicely. Ben Winters has done a tremendous job balancing light and dark throughout the series and he nails the ending, delivering something that manages to be both uplifting and consistent with the journey we've tagged along on. It's a really clever and well-crafted piece of writing. I can't recommend this series highly enough.

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SF quotes

"the Culture had placed its bets—long before the Idiran war had been envisaged—on the machine rather than the human brain. This was because the Culture saw itself as being a self-consciously rational society; and machines, even sentient ones, were more capable of achieving this desired state as well as more efficient at using it once they had. That was good enough for the Culture."— Iain M. Banks